Art in Review; Between the Lines

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 2, 2006

As artists, Lorenzo Homar (1913-2004) and the Reverend Pedro Pietri (1944-2004) look as different as night and day. But they had essentials in common. Both were born in Puerto Rico. Both made a logocentric art of social engagement. Both are all but unknown to the art world at large, a circumstance that these two mini-surveys, lovingly assembled for El Museo del Barrio by Margarita Aguilar, should correct.

Homar had the more conventional career, which is not to say it lacked adventure: while studying art in New York in the 1930's he moonlighted as a vaudeville gymnast and then as a jewelry designer for Cartier. But it was as a printmaker and teacher in Puerto Rico that he found his true m?er.

For more than half a century he produced a stream of posters on political, historical and cultural subjects. In them he turned the words of Puerto Rican poets and verses from popular songs into patterns of lacelike filigree, preserving but transforming their messages. In the process he shaped one of the great Latino print traditions and influenced a generation of artists, among them Antonio Martorell.

The artist-poet known as the Reverend Pedro Pietri was a more colorful figure. He ministered to no typical congregation; his church was the church of the streets. He came to New York as a child and went to school in East Harlem. In his teens he started writing and reciting satirical poetry in the politically loaded mix of Spanish and English called Spanglish. He became a catalytic figure in the city's Latino counterculture of the 1960's and 70's as a founding member of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and resident poet to the Young Lords.

Until his death in 2004 he sustained his Dadaesque persona as a social gadfly. He appeared on sidewalks and in subways carrying handmade signs emblazoned with assertively cryptic phrases. Equal parts prophet, scold and stand-up comic, he distributed pamphlets that mixed poetry with polemics about class, AIDS, war, colonialism, immigration and censorship.

The small career retrospective at El Museo distills Pietri's antic, acidic art through the scant traces of it that remain: signs, props, poetry chapbooks, videos, a vitrine of personal effects. But the true measure of his dynamism and originality lies in the work of the important artists he inspired, among them Ad? Papo Colo, Guillermo G?-Pe?Daniel Joseph Martinez and, perhaps less directly, the young, bright, increasingly interesting James de la Vega.

Any young artist interested in what ''alternative'' can mean in art will want to catch the Reverend's irreverent act. For his performances he sometimes carried an empty can to receive audience contributions. Two are in the show. One is labeled ''Help Me I Can See,'' the other, ''Help Me Not See.'' Art can say no more. HOLLAND COTTER